Abby Sewell knows how to maximize the time it takes for a van or chartered bus to get to a road match.
As a Division III athlete, she doesn’t have a choice.
Unlike bigger schools that might have the financial resources to fly teams to and from destinations beyond a specific radius, Franklin College teams mostly relies on buses or any number of the school’s six 12-passenger vans.
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Sewell, a junior volleyball player, might study for a class, talk to teammates, exchange text messages with family or sleep. Depending on the length of the drive, she’s sometimes able to accomplish all four.
“If it’s less than a one and a half-hour drive, we just take two vans,” said Sewell, a 5-foot-11 middle blocker who previously played at Franklin Community High School. “If it’s over one and a half hours, we take a chartered bus. It depends on the game.”
Franklin College charters buses through Miller Transportation in Louisville. They, like the athletes they transport, remain plenty active.
Five of the other nine schools in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference are in Indiana. The distances from Franklin’s campus range from campus 64 miles (Anderson) to 120 (Manchester). The HCAC’s out-of-state members are Transylvania in Kentucky (168 miles) and Ohio schools Bluffton, Defiance and Mount St. Joseph.
Bluffton is the longest trip of the bunch at 209 miles.
Ten Grizzlies fall sports teams have started their seasons. Besides football, the others have small enough rosters to utilize vans if the destination isn’t more than a couple hours drive.
“We kind of do it by a combination of roster size and geography. It depends how far you’re going, how many kids you’re transporting and what time you’re going to come back,” Franklin College athletics director Kerry Prather said. “We pretty much confine van traveling to close trips with a manageable-sized roster.
“The typical van trips are Anderson, Hanover, DePauw, Wabash, places like that.”
Franklin College football coach Mike Leonard doesn’t have assigned seats for his players, but notes coaches usually sit in the front rows.
“We order those buses in the summertime. Every road game we get at least two buses, which translates to about 90 players and 20 support people,” Leonard said. “Typically, we’ll also take two vans. One is for the trainers, so that they can leave a little early and set things up.”
After a road game, Leonard allows each player the opportunity to ride back with family.
Oftentimes the family brings the player back to Franklin College. Or maybe he spends the night at home before returning to campus the next day. Either way, it’s quality time with loved ones, if only for a few hours.
Asked to name his most memorable bus ride, Grizzlies football player Brayton Shannon pauses for a moment before settling on the final game of the 2017 season, a gut-wrenching 35-34 playoff loss in overtime at Wartburg College.
The Wartburg campus is in Waverly, Iowa, a little less than 500 miles from Franklin.
Shannon, a senior linebacker, said the first 30 minutes of any bus ride are almost always teammates and coaches conversing with one another. Enough time passes and some players try to sleep while others watch a movie, listen to music or do homework.
Not surprisingly, “Hoosiers” and “Remember the Titans” are two movies that have been viewed repeatedly over the years.
“I don’t think I’ve ever watched an entire movie,” Shannon said. “Typically, I’ll watch for an hour and then I’m out. The ride to Wartburg was over seven hours and a playoff game. A lot of us were super-charged. After we lost, the trip home started pretty quiet, but it became a pretty fun ride reminiscing about all the fun times we had that season.”
Senior defensive back Garrett Day said the time is also used by some players to focus on the game about to be played. Day counts the Bluffton trip as his least favorite and the bus ride to Hanover as his favorite.
“The Hanover trip is always pretty fun. It’s not a very long drive, but we’ll watch a movie. My favorite is ‘Remember the Titans,’” Day said. “And the game involves the Victory Bell, but I think that goes in the athletic trainers’ van.”
Teams do occasionally fly. In 2017, the volleyball squad went to the Boston suburb of Waltham, Massachusetts, and the team opened at the Wisconsin-Whitewater Invitational last season. The Grizzlies started this season with three matches in a tournament hosted by UC-Santa Cruz in California.
The volleyball program has used fundraisers such as a golf outing and cornhole tournament to help cover expenses. Other Franklin College teams are also given the option of trying to raise funds in order to take long-distance trips.
Grizzlies volleyball coach Mary Johnston and an assistant coach drive the two vans needed to accommodate all of the players to away matches.
“We try to encourage players to use their time well,” Johnston said. “Obviously, the bus is more spacious, but the school has just upgraded their van fleet. I think they’re more comfortable and they’re easier to drive.”
Johnston, who is in her 10th season, looks back on the end of the 2013-14 season — when her squad broke its eight-year HCAC playoff drought — as her most memorable trip.
Franklin College scored a four-set victory at Mount St. Joseph in the opening round, earning it a semifinal trip to top-seeded Defiance three days later. The Grizzlies lost in three sets to the Yellow Jackets, but the experience was on that no one who was there will forget.
The coach’s least favorite trips are the ones to and from Transylvania because of how long they take. Furthermore, they are usually midweek matches, which means athletes get back to campus late at night or early the next morning.
Even the less enjoyable trips, though, have their upside.
“I find the bus rides are a good time for me to get my stuff done,” Sewell said. “I actually look forward to the road trips. They’re a good bonding time. The vans, not so much. They get crowded. And the rides back are definitely not as fun if we didn’t play well.”
